The Great Bridge (60 page)

But Steinmetz kept pressing the attack through that summer and into fall, opposing the use of Bessemer steel for the superstructure, opposing the awarding of the contract to the Edge Moor Iron Company, the lowest bidder, trotting out every old argument for crucible steel, and being so silly and tiresome about it much of the time that the other young men who had come in with him were left with no choice but to side with the opposition. They were just as eager as ever to clean house but they were looking for something more important to battle over.

But in December, just as had happened three years before, a sensational bridge disaster seemed to add credence to every rumor of shoddy steel and poor engineering. The new Tay Bridge over the Firth of Tay, in Scotland, one of the biggest, most famous bridges in the world, gave way in a gale and collapsed into the sea, taking with it a train carrying seventy-five people, all of whom were killed. The bridge was the work of Britain’s leading engineer and a disciple of the great Stephenson, Sir Thomas Bouch, who, along with Henry Bessemer, had been knighted by Queen Victoria that June. His bridge, a series of trusses, had been built mostly of wrought iron, however, not steel, and subsequent investigations of the disaster indicated that he had not calculated his wind loads accurately. The conclusion was that the engineer was mainly to blame. (His health and mind broken by the ordeal, Bouch died in less than a year.)

As might be expected, the news of the disaster caused a great stir in New York and Brooklyn. McNulty and Paine, interviewed at length in the papers, did their best to assure the reading public that the East River bridge was an entirely different kind of structure. But who was to say? Had not the word of the ill-fated Bouch been as respected as any in the profession?

By curious coincidence, the same papers that carried the Tay Bridge story also reported that J. Lloyd Haigh, “the well-known wire manufacturer” who had supplied the wire for the great cables, had just gone bankrupt. And to add one further note of doom, still another “noted engineer” was claiming the East River bridge would not hold a fifth of the weight that was liable to be put upon it. “W
ILL THE
T
AY
D
ISASTER
B
E
R
EPEATED
B
ETWEEN
N
EW
Y
ORK AND
B
ROOKLYN
?” asked one big headline as the new year 1880, and the new decade, began.

There must have been moments in those early weeks of the new year when Emily Roebling stood alone at a window thinking of the Tay tragedy as she watched the tiny doll-like figures working up among the cables and suspenders. She knew enough now to appreciate the countless number of things that had to be taken into consideration and the immense weight of responsibility every calculation entailed. She knew enough to know how very many things could go wrong. The East River was not the stormy Firth of Tay, standing wide open to the sea, as some were saying, still it was salt water, and for all the shelter Long Island provided, winds on the river could be savage. When the Tay Bridge went, the papers said, the train had dropped nearly ninety feet.

But there must also have been moments during those same weeks when she went about the house or drove along the snow-covered streets of the Heights with her heart lifted as it had not in years. In December, G.K.’s request for a board of inquiry had at last been granted, fourteen years and eight months after Five Forks.

In late February she pasted into her scrapbook a large illustration of Ferdinand de Lesseps, in top hat and overcoat, standing with a group on the summit of the New York anchorage, “inspecting” the bridge, according to the caption. “The Great Engineer” (who was no engineer at all, but a diplomat) had arrived from France to promote what he intended to be the triumph of his career, a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama. In another week or so he would deliver an impassioned speech before the American Society of Civil Engineers (Collingwood and McNulty would be in the audience) and be lionized at a sumptuous banquet at Delmonico’s at which Richard Storrs, the Brooklyn pastor, would deliver the welcoming address and she herself would be among the ladies accompanying De Lesseps when he made his grand entrance into the dining room. The grandfatherly Frenchman was greatly impressed by the bridge, he told reporters, but in the illustration Emily saved, he appears more interested in an unidentified young lady in the foreground.

A full page from
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
went into the scrapbook, a close-up view of workmen out on one of the cables attaching iron suspender bands and to these the wire rope suspenders that would hold the steel floor beams of the roadway. The cables by this time had been thoroughly wrapped from end to end. Once the suspenders were in place, the men could start laying up the crossbeams of the deck, beginning with those closest to the anchorages and towers and working out. The nearest suspenders had only to be pulled back, the beam attached and swung out into place. Planks would be put down over the beam then for the men to stand on as they launched the next beam, and so on out over the water. Once the steel deck began to take form, she would be able to walk out on it herself to look things over as her husband directed.

In April she cut out two articles about St. Ann’s Church, which eleven years before Roebling and Paine had used to sight the center line. The historic old building was about to be demolished—to be “swept away by the march of modern improvement,” said the
Eagle.

Her scrapbook tells the full story of the bridge that year as the public saw it. There was the usual wrangling over finances, a minor accident or two, a great deal of complaining and explaining about the steel contract (the Edge Moor Iron Company was maddeningly slow on delivery), periodic reports on the progress of the work (about the building of a big skew arch over William and North William Streets in New York, for example, and the steady advance of the bridge deck). One tiny item, a clipping not much bigger than a postage stamp, reports that J. Lloyd Haigh of Brooklyn was breaking rocks at Sing Sing. He had been convicted of passing bad checks.

In June Henry Murphy said it would be all right for two Plymouth Church musicians to take their coronets out to the center cradle on the bridge, and there “to the delight of hundreds of upturned faces from the ferryboats and the Fall River boat
Newport,”
they played “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “Rock of Ages,” and “Old Hundred.”

Summer and fall were uneventful on the whole except for one incredible scene that took place at a trustees’ meeting in October, and which had all Brooklyn talking.

The meeting, involving only routine matters, had been about to adjourn when Comptroller Steinmetz announced that he had a communication for the president, whereupon he handed Henry Murphy an unusually lengthy printed document and a messenger burst into the room and distributed additional copies to everyone present. Willam Kingsley slowly got to his feet, unfolded his copy, and moved to have it tabled.

“It is an insult to the dignity of the board that this man should present any communication in this way,” he said.

“Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman,” exclaimed Steinmetz excitedly in broken English. “I demand my communication shall be read.” Kingsley said he had the floor and Steinmetz was out of order.

“Ever since this individual has been a member of this board,” Kingsley said, “he has never suggested a single practical or intelligent idea, but has continually been bringing before the board such claptrap stuff as has just been presented.”

“But the communication has not yet been read,” protested Steinmetz.

Kingsley, “glaring at the Comptroller,” exclaimed, “You must realize, sir, that you are not in the slums of politics.”

The motion to table the document was then quickly carried, while Steinmetz kept protesting. “I represent the citizens of Brooklyn,” he shouted. “I would not be here if I was a private citizen…. Mr. Kingsley’s suggestions have always been heard and accepted, while mine have not.”

“This is all buncombe,” Kingsley snapped back, shaking Steinmetz’ printed letter. “It’s ward politics brought into the board.”

Murphy promptly shut off any further discussion of the subject and took up another matter. But when the meeting adjourned, Kingsley marched over to Steinmetz, who was standing among some of the others in an adjoining office.

“You are acting the part of a demagogue,” Kingsley said to Steinmetz, who was nearly a head shorter. “What or whom do you represent?”

“Mr. Kingsley’s manner was determined,” according to one man in the group, “and as he stood facing Mr. Steinmetz, he looked steadily at him. The latter turned pale, and the other members of the board crowded into the room.”

“I represent the people of Brooklyn,” Steinmetz answered.

“You represent nobody,” said Kingsley.

“You are no gentleman,” said Steinmetz.

“You are a blackguard,” responded Kingsley.

“I am Comptroller and I represent the citizens of Brooklyn.”

“I say you represent nobody—nobody at all.”

“Well, Mr. Kingsley,” said Steinmetz backing off, “I can afford to take that from
you.”

“Of course you will,” said Kingsley.

Steinmetz then turned his back on Kingsley and left the room, but Kingsley followed after, “continuing to express his indignation.”

The story was all over town by nightfall. Steinmetz said later that Kingsley had threatened to strike him, but nobody else who had been in the room agreed with that. But neither could any of the trustees justify Kingsley’s behavior, and the papers made a point of the fact that Steinmetz was a cripple. Even Kingsley’s own
Eagle
allowed it would have been better had the Steinmetz letter been read. As it was, the whole thing had taken on much more importance than it deserved. Every afternoon paper carried the Steinmetz letter in full and there was hardly enough in it to have attracted any but passing interest under normal circumstances. Steinmetz made a number of wild accusations—about the steel contract chiefly—none of which could be supported, and although a few editorial writers took them at face value and made some foolish charges as a result, the whole issue blew over in a matter of days.

Nonetheless, the confrontation in the board room was indicative of the strong feelings developing between various personalities on the board, and half a lifetime later, when Roebling would be asked what part his wife had played in building the bridge, it would be “her remarkable talent as a peacemaker” among these gentlemen and during these particular years that he would praise highest, telling people with customary deadpan understatement how she had a way of “obviating personal friction with her tact” and could smooth over difficulties that were “naturally inherent in a work somewhat political in its conduct.”

Apparently just about everyone involved with the work liked her enormously and held her in great respect, regardless of his politics, profession, age, or particular feelings about her husband. That she was welcome among them, her opinions regarded seriously, was considerable testimony in itself, in a day and age when a woman’s presence in or about a construction job except as a spectator on special occasions was absolutely unheard of.

How many ruffled feathers she smoothed, how many times she sat patiently listening first to one side of an argument, then another, how many tactful words of caution she offered a Henry Murphy or a Ferdinand Roebling or a C. C. Martin before they entered her husband’s sickroom, how frequently she herself dealt directly with a Steinmetz or a Kingsley, is not indicated in the record. But the impression is that she was very busy indeed at just such tasks. Roebling would describe her role as “invaluable.”

In February Henry Murphy, James Stranahan, and the Reverend Dr. Storrs put on formal attire and went over to New York with Martin, Collingwood, and three younger Rennselaer graduates recently hired as assistants to attend a gathering of the alumni of the famous Polytechnic Institute. Collingwood was to be the main speaker of the evening and his subject was the bridge. Murphy and Stranahan had been invited as representatives of the Bridge Company, and Storrs, it seems, was becoming something of a fixture at such occasions, a sort of unofficial chaplain to the somber-looking technical men who talked so matter-of-factly of improving on God’s handiwork and who, since the war, had already changed the look of the country more than any army ever had.

A great deal was said during the course of the evening about what had been accomplished by the 739 engineers the Institute had sent into the world in its fifty-five years, about the countless dams, canals, bridges, railroads, and water works they had built. The strongest testimony of all, however, according to a Professor Greene from Troy, was to say simply that the East River bridge was the work of RPI men—which was not altogether the case but which pleased the professor’s audience no end.

Collingwood spoke a little too long about the staggering quantities of brick, stone, steel, and iron that had gone into the bridge and then announced to great applause that the work was nearly done. The real hero, he said, was Roebling, who had never lost his hold on the bridge. “The men who have come from the Institute to the bridge had come to stay,” he said, “they seem to have a wonderful sticking power.”